Metric Time

This is a discussion on Metric Time within the A Brief History of Cprogramming.com forums, part of the Community Boards category; As I sit here late at night I contemplate about time. It is in so many bases.
Nanoseconds - seconds ...

The 60 second time came from the old days of Babylonia. The Babylonians had a number system with a base of 60. While base 10 for time seems logical, there are just too much erratic behavior in the Lunar Cycles; just look at leap years and daylight savings. Besides, we know exactly how many times Berillium oscillates in a second, so that's good for our Atomic clocks.

Why not just measure stuff in seconds, hektoseconds, kiloseconds, femtoseconds, attoseconds, and whatever else there is?

So a year would be ~31.5gigaseconds.
Each month is ~2.6gigaseconds.
Each day is ~86.4kiloseconds.
Each hour is 3.6kiloseconds.
Each minute is 60 seconds.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

You could base it on hours, or anything else, but a more logical measurement than a second is probably a good idea.

Well, there's a constant(yeah, I know there's some doubt here) speed, and we already have distances, so how about speed of light per meter(or kilometer, or something that makes it more convenient, like AU)

kilometer/speed of light comes out to be 3.3e-6 seconds per unit, so that's probably too small. With megameters/speed of light, it comes out to be 0.003, so 3kilounits~=1second. So that would make it:

One year would be 105megaunits
One month would be 8.7 megaunits
One day would be 388 kilounits.
One hour would be 12 kilounits
One minute would be 200 units

All of my measurements are only accurate to one digit, since I don't know any more than 3e+8 for the speed of light in m/s.

Well... unfortunately, unlike for other units whose definitions are pretty much arbitrary (foot, meter, Kelvin, etc) there is a very strong natural unit for time. In fact, there are two of them, and their ratio is not a power of ten. That's the problem.

The units are the day and the year. Society simply could not run properly if the 'day' was not a unit; there'd be no way to post a consistent set of hours (i.e. business hours) except through a mathematical equation. The year is a slightly more dispensible benchmark than the day, but its relation to the seasons means that agriculture and holiday schedules could not be properly separated from it.

However, we could in principle make the day 10 'hours' long and have each hour consist of 100 'seconds', since those definitions are still quite arbitrary. And weeks and months could be abolished as well (the month no longer correlates with the lunar phases anyway). But I see no practical way to eliminate either the day or the year, so above the level of the day the system would "de-metrify".

Edit:

Flarelocke, your unit would be called the megameter, as it could be used both to measure distance and time. Although, to avoid confusion, maybe light-megameter would be better; in the same way light-year, the distance light travels in one year, is a year of distance. (If that made no sense, read a bit about relativity.)

Once space travel becomes popular, a 300kilounit day might be more to the liking of those in space(approx. 25 hours) because in space, even the length of a day(and thus the sleep/wake cycle) is arbitrary.

It has been found that the circadian rhythm of people who cannot see the sun for an extended period of time is closer to 24.5 hours than to 24.0.